The record of the rocks discloses the fact that the Sequoia flourished on the earth when these dragons of old time and their weird kin inhabited it. Its forests extended over three continents and it blessed with its shade these creatures more strange and huge than the earth has since borne. Under its high, arching columns _dinosaurs_ took toll of all that could be conquered. Within sight of its imposing forests others, equally formidable, wallowed in shallow seas, while overhead soared _pterodactyls_, neither bats nor birds, but giant lizards that had acquired the power of flight. This was millions of years ago. It was during the middle period of life, or, what geologists term the Miocene. It was before the advent of fur and feathers—aeons, almost, before man’s coming. In point of time the antiquity of all living things on earth today is of a recent yesterday when compared to the antiquity of the Sequoia. The frail tenure of human works is as but a thousand years amid eternity; nothing; a mockery. The pick of the fossil hunter has unearthed fossil remains of Sequoia leaves and cones in strata as early as the _Triassic_. This period represents the morning of reptilian life and is the first of three great ages of the Miocene. At its advent moving life had already safely crossed the border-line of its dependence on water for existence and had succeeded, slowly and laboriously, in invading dry land. Hence, the Sequoia as a race has a claim to almost fabulous antiquity. Memorials of the Sequoia’s ancestry are more abundant in the rocks of the two succeeding periods of the Miocene, the _Jurassic_ and the _Cretaceous_. Under the lava flows of Mt. Shasta imprints of its leaves and cones are found. This is indubitable evidence that the Sequoia existed in California at that time. Fossil remains have also been found in localities ranging from “France and Hungary to Spitzbergen and from Greenland to Oregon and Nebraska.” These stratified remains offer positive proof that the Sequoia was a great genus covering the entire Northern Hemisphere and that the now desolate Arctic regions, which were then warm, were luxuriant with many of its species. In short, the Sequoia was one of the chief garments of the earth’s vegetation during Miocene times. Its forests must have been the most imposing the earth has ever known. Truly, they were the forests primeval. It is not a little remarkable that the Sequoia was in existence even before the very mountains which are enobled today by its presence. The vagaries of mutability have been such that it was actually present on earth during the genesis of the Sierra Nevada and saw this range lifted to its place in the sun. Indeed, the eternality of the hills is a misnomer, for mountains have their birth and their youth, their old age and their obliteration. Like successions of living forms they have had their entrance and exit on this terrestrial stage.